Technical Debt and Waste in Non-Functional Requirements Documentation: An Exploratory Study

TL;DR

This study investigates potential technical debt and waste in non-functional requirements documentation by analyzing survey data, revealing that important NFRs are often undocumented, indicating risks of technical debt and waste.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative approach to identify potential technical debt and waste in NFR documentation using survey data analysis.

Findings

Important NFRs like Maintainability and Reliability are under-documented.

Higher risk of technical debt exists for certain NFR types.

Waste related to Security NFRs is present but less prevalent.

Abstract

Background: To adequately attend to non-functional requirements (NFRs), they must be documented; otherwise, developers would not know about their existence. However, the documentation of NFRs may be subject to Technical Debt and Waste, as any other software artefact. Aims: The goal is to explore indicators of potential Technical Debt and Waste in NFRs documentation. Method: Based on a subset of data acquired from the most recent NaPiRE (Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering) survey, we calculate, for a standard set of NFR types, how often respondents state they document a specific type of NFR when they also state that it is important. This allows us to quantify the occurrence of potential Technical Debt and Waste. Results: Based on 398 survey responses, four NFR types (Maintainability, Reliability, Usability, and Performance) are labelled as important but they are not documented by more than 22% of the respondents. We interpret that these NFR types have a higher risk of Technical Debt than other NFR types. Regarding Waste, 15% of the respondents state they document NFRs related to Security and they do not consider it important. Conclusions: There is a clear indication that there is a risk of Technical Debt for a fixed set of NFRs since there is a lack of documentation of important NFRs. The potential risk of incurring Waste is also present but to a lesser extent.